by Gerald Elias
She read Pallottelli’s quasi-erotic, sometimes humorous, almost always lurid tale of Matteo Cherubino, a midget who rose miraculously from humble peasant beginnings in the Italian region of Umbria to become one of the most celebrated musicians in seventeenth-century Europe. How he became a favorite of princes, and even more so, if Pallottelli is to be believed, the princes’ wives. How his amazing combination of virtuosity and seductive musicality brought him fame, fortune (including the gift of the Stradivarius that bears his name on the label), and finally his violent death at the hands of a cuckold husband.
Legend said that even the skills of the most renowned violinists of his day, like Corelli in Rome or Vivaldi in Venice, didn’t compare to the brilliance of Matteo Cherubino. His persona expanded to mythical proportions, in part because Cherubino, by reputation a highly secretive, untrusting individual, never wrote down a note of his music in order to jealously guard his musical secrets from his rivals. Everything he performed was either improvised or played from memory. It was said his improvisations could stir an audience into fits of emotional ecstasy or distress. However, because there is not a single verifiable note of his music (purported “findings” of his music have all been thoroughly disproved by Baroque music scholars), or one painting of him (reportedly so self-conscious was he of his dwarfish physique and allegedly brutish countenance), the very existence of Matteo Cherubino has never been convincingly proved.
The booklet’s print was old-fashioned and the ink had blurred from age into the pithy paper, so Yumi read and reread slowly. She was intrigued and amused at Pallottelli’s effort to be didactic, incorporating Cherubino’s explanations of violin technique to his lover, using puns and double entendres. It almost made Cherubino sound like Mr. Jacobus from an earlier century, Yumi thought.
When she came to the description of the violin that Stradivari made for Cherubino, the very violin being sought after by Jacobus and Nathaniel, it took her breath away.
It was not just another violin, Piccolino immediately saw with widening eyes. It was a violin unlike any he had ever seen. The grain of the wood appeared to be in flame. The varnish was ablaze—now red, now orange, now golden.
As the Duchess placed the violin in his hands, he could see that the purfling—the fine inlay bordering the edge of the violin that was usually made of wood, straw, or even paper—was here made with pure gold. The pegs were gargoyles of engraved ivory. Breathing all this fire was a scroll in the shape of a dragon’s head whose glowing ruby eyes stared defiantly into his.
“What man could create something such as this?” said Piccolino, staring.
Yumi stopped rocking in her chair and put her head in her hands.
She heard a knock on the door.
“Yes?” she asked.
“It’s me.”
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Nathaniel,” said Yumi, opening the door. “It was so quiet. I forgot all about the time.”
“That’s okay, but we better go or we’ll be late meeting Jake at the Vanders’ apartment. He really has a bee in his bonnet this morning.”
Yumi dressed quickly. They took the elevator to the lobby and hurried to Williams’s car double-parked on the north side of Ninety-sixth Street. Williams made a U-turn, nearly hitting a tree planted on the opposite curb, in order to head east.
Almost immediately Nathaniel slowed from eight miles per hour to six in order to let a cab cut in front of him and avoid having the front hood of his car demolished. The lady in the car behind sat on her horn to offer her opinion of Nathaniel’s driving. Yumi reflexively gripped the door handle as if it would provide protection and cautiously turned around in order to see whether the lady was truly honking at them. The lady gave her the finger, confirming her suspicions.
Perhaps she’s a relation of Mr. Jacobus, she thought.
They turned right onto Lexington Avenue to head downtown to the Vanders’ apartment. Traffic was at a standstill.
“Hope we’re not late for Jake or we’ll have hell to pay,” said Williams.
“Mr. Williams, while we’re waiting here, may I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Shoot?” Yumi was taken aback.
“That means, ‘Go ahead and ask.’ ”
“Thank you. The photo in my room. Were they your parents?”
“Yeah. Elna and Robert Williams.”
“They look like nice people.”
“I suppose they were. That photo is one of the few things I can remember them by.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s not a secret. My mother, she had a peacetime job with the American armed forces in the ’40s. Cleaning clothes. My pop was a jazz musician and my first music teacher when I was a shrimp. Mom was doing laundry for the naval officers on the USS Arizona when it was bombed and sunk at Pearl Harbor. Pop just couldn’t get over it. He needed to get back, or so my grandmother told me. He enlisted in an all-Negro regiment in the army. He died of malaria in a prisoner-of-war camp in Malaysia in 1943. I never saw him again.”
“I’m so sorry!” said Yumi.
“It’s okay. Certainly not your fault. Nothing against you, though I’m telling you I’m not planning any trips to Japan in the near future.”
After an uncomfortable silence, Yumi sought to change the subject.
“Mr. Williams, I am trying to understand Mr. Jacobus a little more. The two of you seem so different. Yet it is obvious you’re such good friends, even when he . . . when he . . .”
“Gets ornery?”
“Yes, I suppose that is the word I was looking for.”
“Well, it looks like we’ll be stuck here for a while, so at least I don’t have to give you the Reader’s Digest version.” Williams laughed his carpenter saw laugh. “I’m just gonna drop you off when we get there, anyway.”
Williams explained that after he and Jacobus had met as students at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, the two of them decided to form a trio along with pianist and fellow student Helen Kaufman. “When we graduated we began touring, first locally, then nationwide,” said Nathaniel. “We called ourselves the Dumky Trio.”
“After the piece by Dvořák?” asked Yumi.
“Sort of. Dvořák actually named the piece after a Czech dance called the dumka, which is characterized by contrasting moods and tempos. Since our trio had a Jew, a woman, and me, the name Dumky Trio made a good fit, don’t you think?
“One time, a few years after the war, we were touring the Midwest and had a concert scheduled in the town of West Aberdeen, Ohio, not too far south of Cincinnati. Since most of the places we played were small towns, we tried to do music we knew the audience would like . . . not too much avant-garde stuff like Elliott Carter or the politically charged stuff.”
“Like Shostakovich?”
“Yeah, you get the idea. I can’t remember exactly what was on that West Aberdeen program—probably Haydn or Beethoven or Mendelssohn.
“So anyway, we arrived at the high school auditorium about an hour before the concert—our transportation was one of those old-fashioned station wagons with wooden sides. All the ushers were arriving—just a bunch of teenage girls with big puffy pink dresses and big puffy hair and acne cream, getting things all spiffed up. Chairs were set up, flowers were arranged. They even had the piano tuned!” Williams laughed.
“Jake was sort of the business leader of our trio, so he asks this one girl, ‘Honey, where’s Mr. Drake?’ Orin Drake was the director of the Greater Aberdeen Concert Society. Anyway, when this itty-bitty girl looks at the three of us, she turns even whiter than her carnation, and without saying a word just points over to a dinky little office off the side of the stage, behind some brooms and old desks and sand bags.
“By the way people were lookin’ at us, we had a feeling what was up, but anyway Jake puts on his best smile when he finds Drake, a big guy in a small suit. Drake’s gut was just poppin’ out and his tie wasn’t even coverin’ it! Jake’s smile was the first thing
Drake saw, so he started to kinda smile back, but when he saw me, honey, Jesse Owens couldn’t have been faster than the speed that smile disappeared!
“He says, ‘Ohhhhhh. Oooooh. No, no, no. I’m sorry. Ohhhhhhhh. Ooooooh. We can’t have this. No, we can’t have this.’
“Jake says, still with the smile on his face, ‘Mr. Drake, is there a problem?’ as if he had no idea what was goin’ on.
“Drake told Jake that the presenters of their concert series do not permit Negroes in the auditorium. ‘Mainly for his safety,’ Drake said, pointing at me.
“Jake pointed out that as they were in a public school, the laws of the state of Ohio would permit persons of any color access to its premises.
“Drake insisted that since the concert was being presented by a private organization, the Greater Aberdeen Concert Society, it had the right to decide who may and who may not perform.
“Well, Yumi, they went around in circles for a while. . . . Whoops.” Williams had been stopped at a red light at Eighty-sixth Street and it had been green for about two seconds. Several impatient drivers behind him were reminding him of the fact.
“Where was I?”
“You had just said, ‘They went around in circles.’ ” Yumi, who had maintained her steel grip on the door handle, wondered whether she would live to hear the end of the story.
“Oh, yeah. Thanks. At that point I would have expected Jake to tell the man off and we would have driven away, minus our $250 fee, of course, which was a lot of money for us in those days. That would have been fine with me. I didn’t need to be surrounded by a bunch of white folk lookin’ for a black boy like me to lynch.”
“Mr. Williams,” said Yumi, “certainly you must be exaggerating. Those people were music lovers. They were there to hear a concert!”
“Well, maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. But I didn’t feel like waitin’ around to find out, honey!”
Yumi considered that if Americans were as belligerent as their driving habits suggested, perhaps Nathaniel wasn’t exaggerating.
“What did Mr. Jacobus say?”
“He says, ‘Well, Mr. Drake, it appears we have a problem. What do you suggest?’
“I’m tellin’ you, I was just dumbfounded and felt like lynching Jake for dealing with this guy. But Drake, he says, ‘Would it be possible, Mr. Jacobus, for you and Miss Kaufman here to play a violin and piano recital?’
“Jake thinks for a minute and says, ‘Well, Mr. Drake, it’s such a last-minute thing, you see. I couldn’t give a standard type of recital with a lot of Beethoven and Brahms. But what I could do is play some traditional favorites, some Americana, some popular encores. Helen and I often play together as a duo, and we keep some of our encore-type music in the back of the station wagon. Would that suit?’
“I’ll never forget how he said, ‘Would that suit?’ ” Nathaniel laughed. “I don’t think Jake ever said ‘Would that suit?’ before or since. ‘Would that suit!’ It was at that point when I knew somethin’ was up, so I just kept my mouth shut.
“Drake obviously didn’t want to have to cancel the concert and disappoint the people who were already filling up the auditorium, let alone return all their money, so he swallowed Jake’s proposal hook, line, and sinker. When Jake asked Drake to please announce to the audience at the beginning of the concert that Daniel Jacobus was going to play a traditional Americana program and that Mr. Jacobus would announce the individual pieces as he played them, Drake was only too relieved to agree.
“You followin’ me so far?”
“I think so.”
“Good, because that was just the preamble. This here’s the juicy part. As Jake and Helen and I were walking back to the station wagon to get his violin, Jake says, ‘Nathaniel, wait here in the station wagon, lock the doors, and as soon as the concert’s over, get the engine running.’ ”
Williams rolled up the window of his red Rabbit as the exhaust and noise from the bus in front of them made it impossible to continue the story. But since the air-conditioning in the Rabbit wasn’t working, the result was hardly more bearable.
“Now, you’ve got to realize that I got the rest of the story secondhand because I was lyin’ down in the backseat of that old station wagon with the windows rolled up and sweatin’ up a storm just like we are here, except it wasn’t the heat so much that was makin’ me sweat, it was the fear. It wasn’t until it was all over that Helen told me what had happened inside the auditorium.” Nathaniel chuckled conspiratorially.
“So anyway, Orin Drake announces to the audience that because of ‘technical difficulties’ the Dumky Trio would be replaced by a violin and piano recital by Daniel Jacobus and Helen Kaufman. The audience hems and haws a bit but applauds when Jake walks on stage and bows. Then he announces, ‘For my first number I would like to play the spiritual “Deep River,” so beautifully sung by the great Negro opera singer, Marian Anderson.’
“When he finishes ‘Deep River,’ he announces that he would like to play ‘a transcription of ‘Ol’ Man River,’ composed by the Jew Jerome Kern and made famous by the Negro Communist Paul Robeson. After that he says, ‘Next I’d like to play the Second Prelude by another Jewish composer, George Gershwin, which is based on the Negro blues style, and arranged by the Russian-Jewish violinist Jascha Heifetz.’ Then, ‘Next, the slow movement of the Violin Sonata by Aaron Copland, who is not only Jewish, but I think he’s homosexual as well.’ Finally, ‘Speaking of homosexuals, for my final number I’d like to perform ‘Sérénade Mélancolique’ by Peter Tchaikovsky, perhaps the greatest homosexual composer of all, the man who wrote the 1812 Overture, the Nutcracker, and Romeo and Juliet.’
“Well, Yumi,” Williams said, “by the time Jake finished the Tchaikovsky there were about six people left in the audience and they only stayed in order to boo. But after each piece, Jake just bowed and smiled as if he were playing at Carnegie Hall.
“After Jake walked off the stage and was putting his violin back in the case, ol’ Drake went up to him, fit to be tied. He said, ‘Mr. Jacobus, I have two things to tell you. The first is, neither you nor your friends are welcome in West Aberdeen. We hope, no, we strongly suggest, that you never return here again.’
“ ‘Oh?’ said Jake. ‘And the second thing?’
“ ‘The second thing is, since your contract with the Greater Aberdeen Concert Society required you to perform a trio concert, not a violin and piano recital, we feel we are under no obligation to pay your fee.’
“ ‘Well, that’s fine,’ Jake said.
“Drake said, ‘That’s fine?’ I guess he expected Jake to make a fuss.
“And Jake said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine, because I would rather kiss Jackie Robinson’s ass than take one cent from you.’
“And that’s why I will always love Daniel Jacobus, Yumi,” Nathaniel said as he double-parked in front of the Vanders’ apartment building. As Yumi got out of the car, he called out, “Even when he’s ornery.”
FOURTEEN
Jacobus, who had fallen asleep on his feet in front of the Vanders’ apartment building, felt someone touch his arm. Thinking it was the doorman again, he swung wildly, trying to hit him with whatever little strength he felt. He missed, and when Yumi said, “Mr. Jacobus, it’s me,” he replied, “About time. Let’s go.”
Jacobus had arrived early and waited for Yumi under the building’s green awning, shielding himself from the city’s sullen heat. He looked more haggard than ever, having barely slept the previous night, wearing the same shoddy clothes as yesterday. The doorman had told him not to stand in front of the upscale building and had threatened to call the cops on him for loitering, taking him for a blind beggar. Jacobus asked him. “So where’s my tin cup?”
Jacobus knew he was living on borrowed time. He knew that as soon as he stepped inside the Vanders’ opulent residence, the call would go out to Lilburn that he hadn’t dropped his investigation. Lilburn would then undoubtedly raise the hue and cry, and with Lilburn’s powers of persuasion it would b
e only a matter of time before the cops got interested enough to pick him up. With no other suspects, why not?
Jacobus saw his task, as he usually saw things, in two parts. The first was to turn the MAP principals on each other like a pack of wild dogs, using the Piccolino Strad as meat. Second, he hoped to recover the Piccolino Strad. What complicated matters was that he didn’t think the MAP people had anything to do with the theft. He thought, on the other hand, that Yumi did. Yet the more he considered the possible motivation for Yumi and whomever she might have worked with, the more sympathetic he became. He knew he couldn’t confront Yumi with his suspicions because she would just put up a brick wall of denial, which would lead to a quick dead end. Rather, he had to flush her out of her current role and see where it took her but without allowing anyone to realize he didn’t think MAP was involved. How he would reconcile his commitment to Williams to recover the violin with his growing sentiment not to see the actual thief punished was still up in the air.
At the same time, he knew that he himself was a suspect, that he would probably be attacked as such by the MAP people, and that if he didn’t recover the violin he might well end up being the one in jail. It intrigued him to think how Yumi might react if he were to be accused. He decided he would let MAP rant and assess Yumi’s reaction. He was guessing that if she was culpable she would maintain her silence, willing to let him take his lumps. If she wasn’t she would probably jump to his aid. However, there were no guarantees to these assumptions either.
In any event he had to maintain the posture that he suspected the MAP people because of his obligation to Williams, whose one and only objective was the recovery of the violin. If Williams found out that he had co-opted that objective for his own purposes, their friendship, one of the few things Jacobus valued, would be severely jeopardized.
Jacobus decided his only chance to win the day with his head still intact was to do what he had always done—tell the truth, though perhaps “with a little extra mustard,” fully aware of his seemingly limitless ability to disturb people.
